Man jailed for violent rape

Mark McAnaw (40) of Harrow View, Harrow, Middlesex denied the charges initially and claimed that he had simply hugged and comforted the 19-year-old student.

He later told the jury during his 10-day trial at the Central Criminal Court that the girl had instigated sex and led him to her bedroom.

He has three previous convictions for public order in Ireland and a number of convictions from England which included a 1989 conviction for kidnapping for which he received the equivalent of the Probation Act.

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He was convicted unanimously by the jury last month of oral raping the girl and sexually assaulting her on October 30, 2010.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy described it as an “out of the blue attack on a totally innocent victim.”
Garda Helena McTiernan told Patricia McLaughlin BL, prosecuting (with Bernard Condon SC) that the teenager was so terrified during the course of the ordeal that she urinated on herself and vomited. She fought McAnaw and the subsequent struggle between them was so violent that a radiator was pulled off her bedroom wall.

She said even though she had been living in the same house as McAnaw, she had not met him before he walked into her bedroom at 6 pm that evening and announced: “You are going to close your eyes and we are going to have sex.”
The girl refused and said she didn’t know him but he jumped on top of her and pinned her to her bed. She described him as smelling of cigarettes.

Gda McTiernan said the girl “clearly protested” and physically fought against McAnaw. A violent struggle followed and the pair fell off the bed onto the floor.

She later told gardai she was “afraid for her life” and McAnaw covered her mouth with his hand. She asked him if he was going to kill her and he replied: “If you are a good girl, I won’t kill you”.
Gda McTiernan said the victim later told gardai that at this point her “survival instincts” kicked in and she started to comply with McAnaw’s orders because she was in fear for her life.
He told her to get back on the bed before he sexually assaulted her and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
Gda McTiernan said at one stage he went into a utility room next to the victim’s bedroom to get her a glass of water but she had no opportunity to escape.
When he arrived back into the room he told her “to get back to work” before he again forced her to perform oral sex and tried to have sex with her.
The incident ended shortly afterwards when the victim said she was “sick, tired and unable to continue”.
She said McAnaw then changed from behaving like “a crazy man to behaving as if they were a couple” kissing and cuddling her in the sitting room in the house and enquiring after her welfare.

The victim managed to stay composed and rang her mother abroad, telling her to call the gardai.
The housekeeper for the house arrived a short time later to find the victim in a distressed state with a swollen eye and a cut ankle. The gardai arrived a short time later.

Gda McTiernan said McAnaw’s parents are Irish and his mother is from Donegal.
Before handing out the nine year sentence, Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said it was a case of “great seriousness”.
He described it as an attack on a young foreign girl which lasted a considerable period of time and said the extent of violence was “very significant.”
“She was visiting this country as a young student and so she was more vulnerable. She was alone in Ireland and this is a serious factor,” he said.
McAnaw’s counsel asked Mr Justice McCarthy to consider suspending part of the sentence but he was refused.

ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE
The woman’s victim impact report stated that she had once felt happy, lucky and privileged and had no need to cry but someone took that life away from her.
She said she suffered from fear, disgust, paranoia and anger after McAnaw’s attack and could see his “sneering face” in other people’s faces and smell “his smell of cigarettes, sweat and faeces” from her hands and clothes.
“I have loneliness around me and I like it. I feel empty inside apart from fear and anger. I am not lost, just displaced. I have so many doubts, so many apprehensions and my life is hanging on by a thread,” the woman said.

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“It is so inhumane that someone would have to go through such pain. It is hurtful this pain should exist in this world.”
“I know I will never get back to my life that way it was. I have lost a life and now I have a new one,” she concluded in the report.
Desmond Murphy SC, defending, told Mr Justice McCarthy that despite his client’s previous convictions, he has no history of extreme violence nor is there a suggestion that he has previously posed a threat to women.

He asked the court to accept that the attack was not premeditated, there were no weapons used and he made no attempt to escape the house afterwards.
Counsel accepted that there had been gratuitous violence and threats and that McAnaw has made no apology to the woman.

ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE FROM THE VICTIM IMPACT REPORT
Gda McTiernan read a victim impact statement into the court in which the teenager said in her life before the attack she was happy and grateful for her life.
“I felt privileged, I knew I was lucky, I was felling confident, I was able to do anything I wanted. I was strong minded and I had no reason to cry. I enjoyed hanging around with my friends, everything was easy and lightweight,” she said.
She said in the immediate aftermath of the attack she was afraid of “every single little thing, getting out of bed, going to the shops.”
She said she didn’t want to face other people having fun, smiling and building relationships.
She couldn’t stay alone and couldn’t asleep alone because she was afraid someone would come into her room and do something bad to her.
She said she was disgusted with herself and could barley look at herself. “I did not want to be beautiful because I didn’t want people looking at me. I could not stand people touching me,” the teenager said.
“It was like I had divided my life in two parts. I did not want to deal with any feelings and they were piling and piling on top of each other until they exploded. I had to deal with them then and that is when the sorrow appeared. I was desperate, crying each time I was alone. I wanted to beat my head against the wall,” the woman continued.

“I hated people and I wanted them to hate me. I was angry with everyone. I hated the world around me, hated human kind. It was the world’s fault. I was being so mean and so rude to people.”
“It really hurts when I think of me being like a wreck.”

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